Monday, August 7, 2017

The Gingerbread House

Once upon a time, there was a house on
the top of a high hill in Italy. The
surroundings

were spectacular, so beautiful that they cast a sort of
enchantment on the place, and on the ability to view it realistically. It created an almost insurmountable desire to
just stay there and look at the constantly changing light and shadow on the
wonderful landscape.

The house was actually two houses, one
the family home of the owners, and the second a building that had been
converted into two apartments, upstairs and downstairs. The buildings looked quite charming, and all
around, of course, was the incredible landscape and the quiet of an isolated
location surrounded by nature.

Ahhhh, things are not always what they
seem…

The houses belonged to an old
acquaintance of my partner, or actually, to her husband. They had not really been in touch over the
years except for a few casual meetings, but when Lucretia (as we will call her)
heard that we were looking for a house to rent, she got in touch.

She is a very attractive woman for her
age (50), and was very charming, smiling all the time, and expressing great
interest in our needs. We could rent one apartment, ground floor, and use some
of the outbuildings or sheds for the dogs.
There was a great deal of land around, we could make yards, kennels, no
problem. There was a lot of junk around,
her husband was one of those people who believed that everything could possibly
be of use at some time, and so collected all the discards of everyone and piled
it up around the property. There were
stacks of all sorts of old building materials, broken furniture, lumber, window
frames, old doors – you name it, and probably you could find it. But we could see that with some clean up, the
place had great potential.

Her husband, Giovanni, was dying, she
told us. He had a cancer of the brain,
which was incurable, although various treatments had been tried. She needed help caring for the animals and
the place, so was interested in renting the apartment. The upstairs apartment was being reserved for
the person who would have to take care of Giovanni when he was not able to
function anymore.

Once he was dead, the junk could be taken
care of…

She promised us plenty of space for the
dogs, and her help in finding some work with the dogs with children's groups,
something I had done in the past and was very interested in continuing to do.

We should have been more careful, we
should have asked more questions, we should have inspected everything more
thoroughly….but like little Hansel and Gretel, we were tempted and seduced by
the smiles, the wonderful scenery, and the idea that the little apartment would
later be expanded, the junk gotten rid of, and there would be plenty of room
for the dogs.

So we moved in. It worked out that we moved at the worst
possible time of the year, November, when everything was cold, gray, damp, and
uncomfortable. There was incredible fog,
like I had never seen before – when you looked out over the landscape, the fog
looked like a sea, with the tops of the hills sticking out like islands. It was often wet and rainy, enough to turn
the strange local ground into thick and sticky mud, that clung to everything
and turned to heavy dust when it dried.
We were very cramped in the tiny house, as all the dogs were inside with
us. Although we had been promised use of
outbuildings to make kennels for the dogs, and the possibility of putting up
prefab kennels next to the house, the area that actually we were allowed to use
was much less than we had been expecting, and the fence around the yard was not
yet finished either. So the house was in
fact more of a kennel, and there was a constant battle against the mud and dust
– which we usually lost…The house was heated with a wood burning furnace that
was connected to both houses, and there was also plenty of hot water. But there were few other amenities.

Living in the house gave us a different
viewpoint than we had when we first came to see it. The ceilings were very low, the insulation
was very poor, the living room had no windows at all, and it was very cold if
the furnace was not on. There was no
connection for the television, the phone reception was not reliable, and the
wifi was really our only connection to the world.

The house actually was very strange. It was almost completely paneled in wood, but
obviously the work had not been done by professional experts. The construction seemed to have been done in
a strange way, without proper insulation, so there was constantly a drizzle of
dust and other unidentified materials falling through the cracks in the ceiling
and accumulating everywhere. The doors
didn't really fit properly, so according to the weather, sometimes they closed
and sometimes they didn't, swinging open of their own accord. The pipes for the radiators were not in the
walls but rather haphazardly crisscrossing the rooms. I don't think the apartment would have passed
any safety and up to code examinations…

We had only casually met the homeowner,
Giovanni, all of our dealing had been with his wife. But now, wife and children spent almost all
their time in an apartment in town, and we were alone on the property with
him. Lucretia had expected him to be
dead by now of the brain cancer.
However, it had been operated on, and he had gone through the usual
treatments, and it seemed to be in remission. Lucretia's plans were not going as she had
expected…

Giovanni was a very kind, interesting and
helpful person. He loved animals, had
three dogs of his own, as well as other animals, and deeply loved nature and a
life devoted to it. After many years of
being a town dweller and working in a bank, he finally had fulfilled his dream
of having a house in the country where he could have some animals, grow some of
his own food, and enjoy the great beauty of his surroundings. He loved going for walks with his dogs in the
surrounding woods and fields.

Giovanni was interested in our dogs, and
did a great deal to help us build a kennel room and a yard for the dogs to run
in. He was very clever at finding
solutions for many things, and had a huge variety of tools and also of building
materials, almost all of it recycled.
Things that were junk for others made his eyes light with pleasure and
he would bring home all sorts of things that might be of use in the future.

I was familiar with this point of view,
the Bedouin also believed that everything might possibly be of use some time in
the future. There were usually big piles
of what we might call junk in the vicinity of their dwellings, but for them
these were future treasures.

I found myself living as if I was back at
the beginning of Shaar Hagai, cleaning, building, constructing, making use of
everything to save money. Giovanni did
not consider at all that I was a not so young woman, there was work to be
done. And to my surprise and pleasure, I
found myself capable of doing things I had not done for years.

But sadly, as in all fairy tales, the good
king was fading…Giovanni started to feel unwell, and examination showed that
the cancer was back. He went through
another operation, but although he refused to give up on his life and
activities, the prognosis was not good, not good at all…

Here the story becomes dark. Giovanni's wife and three children, who we
had hardly seen until now, started spending more time on the property. Lucretia worked part time as a teacher and was
a writer of children's books, quite successfully. When we first met Lucretia and discussed the
possibility of renting a place from them, she was very enthusiastic, she told
us she loved animals and nature and would be happy to have us with the dogs,
and that she would be able to help us find work, in projects for educating
children about animals and science that she was involved in. This sounded great!

But the facts turned out to be
different. There was no more discussion
of mutual projects. To the contrary, the
dogs bothered her, she didn't want us to keep them in the house, but the areas
promised us for the dogs outside of the house, had been cut in half. The dogs
barked and disturbed her, the dogs smelled, the dogs, the dogs, the dogs….In
fact, most of the barking of the dogs was caused by her children and dogs
running around and agitating our dogs with screaming, waving of sticks, riding
by on bicycles, and doing whatever they could invent to make the dogs crazy…

The situation deteriorated. Giovanni was becoming weaker in front of our
eyes, although he was trying very hard to continue to live the life he
loved. But we found out that Lucretia
had managed to have him declared incompetent (after all, he was a "man with
half a brain"), so that she was now the owner of all the property. It was quite obvious what her intentions
were, her time schedule had just been spoiled by Giovanni's persistence in
staying alive. It was obviously also
disappointing for the "cucciolino" ( "puppy dog") that
followed after her everywhere and was obviously waiting to take over from
Giovanni….

Lucretia had an older daughter from an
earlier marriage. She was an attractive
girl like her mother, with ambitions to be a model, something that was very
unlikely to happen – at 21, she was too old to start a modeling career. She now came to live in the apartment above
us, which was supposed to be for caretakers of Giovanni. There was little caretaking going on. However, she had no compunctions about
caretaking for herself – starting with complaints about the dogs, she continued
with complaints about us watching movies on the computer later than 10 in the
evening. Her usual way of complaining was to bang on the floor of her rooms
with a broom (our ceiling), violently and insistently. If that wasn't enough, she would come down
and pound on our door, screaming, "I can't sleep!!!! Look at my face!!!
Look at what I look like when I can't sleep!!!!"

Of course, the dogs did not find this at all
amusing, and barked in our defense, causing more banging and screaming.

The evil queens punished us in many
ways. There was no longer any heat
provided, and it was very cold, the middle of the winter, with temperature
around freezing. There was no hot
water. And the final straw was when they
shut off the wifi connection, our only connection to the outside world….

We were given one month to pack up and
leave. There was no question that we
wanted to leave, we were extremely stressed and so were the dogs, we were very
worried about them as well. We felt very
sorry about Giovanni, who was a shadow of his former self, and although feeling
very unhappy, was not in a condition to get involved. (Subsequently, the old
king was committed to a hospital, where the evil queen refused to let his
friends even visit him without her permission…)

Finding a place to go to in one month,
with all the dogs – more or less mission impossible…

But we were determined to
get out. The enchantment had ended, we
could now see the reality, and it was not a fairytale, not a gingerbread house,
but a dark and depressing soap

3 comments:

You must have been so stressed! I'm sorry it happened that way. You did not deserve any of that treatment. How nice of you to share the contrasts, the goodness of Giovanni. That shows your beautiful heart and ability to appreciate those people and things that matter in life and goodness. He sounds like he was a good man. How lucky he was rot get to enjoy meeting you and having that time. Maybe thats why you were sent there. You are a survivor and a fair person. I think of you often and the dogs and send many good wishes your way. Thanks for the update.

I am sorry you had to have these additional stressful living conditions after leaving your beloved home in Israel. It is blessed that you were able to help Giovanni have some happy times, and he was able to help you for awhile. I hope this next chapter goes much smoother.

Really! GOOD GRIEFSounds like a horror story all right.Hard to imagine such an evil personality.Sounds like Cruella de Vil from "101 Dalmatians".She wasn't good looking because she was kind.And I guess she conned Giovanni too!Sorry you didn't smell the fire and brimstone before.I hear there is a heat wave in Italy now.I hope you get back to normalcy soon and don't have any more complications.I wish I could read about more joyous events. But I love hearing from you. Wish I could help more than give encouragement.A